Congratulations to Prof. David Cash, who has just been awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER award for his project entitled “CAREER: Cryptography for Secure Outsourcing.” The grant runs from June 2015 to May 2020 and is for a total amount of $566,912.
The project considers a situation that is all too common today: Individuals and organizations routinely trust third party providers to hold sensitive data, putting it at risk of exposure. While the data could be encrypted under a key that is kept secret from the provider, it rarely is, due to the inconvenience and increased cost of managing the cryptography.
David’s CAREER project aims to develop technologies for working with encrypted data efficiently and conveniently. In particular, it will enable searching on encrypted data, which is prevented by currently deployed encryption, and running arbitrary programs efficiently on encrypted data. The broader impact of this work will include new, practical techniques for searchable encryption and other outsourcing technologies, and foundational results for both primitives to deepen understanding of their potential.
In more detail, the project will develop new techniques for searchable encryption to support more flexible and usable searching, to improve efficiency, and to enhance security by leaking less information to a malicious service provider. In particular, it will unify the line of cryptography research on encrypted searching with well-developed information retrieval techniques. It will also investigate constructions and foundations of oblivious RAM. Finally, it will develop fundamental new lower bounds to map the landscape of possibilities for oblivious RAM, and design and analyze new constructions.
For more details on David’s CAREER grant, please consult:
- NSF’s website: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1453132
- David’s project website: http://www.research.rutgers.edu/~dc789/career/
To quote the NSF, “The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.”
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